Exclusive: Met Police in £750m outsourcing 'megadeal'

The Metropolitan Police Service is looking to slash its IT costs by consolidating several current IT and telecoms contracts into a single outsourcing megadeal that could be worth as much as £750m.

The London police force wants a single supplier or a consortium to run its entire IT and communications infrastructure from July next year in a contract that silicon.com has learnt is "likely to exceed" £50m a year and will initially be signed for 10 years with the option of an additional three years.

The contract will cover the development, supply and maintenance of infrastructure, desktop, network, software and hardware services, including those for major telephony and crime reporting information systems.

The exercise is an attempt to cut the cost of maintaining and managing around five separate IT and communications contracts.

The main deal that will be affected is the £125m Atos Origin contract (originally signed with Sema in 1999) covering 14,500 desktops and network support, which is up for tender this year anyway.

A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police was not immediately able to confirm which other contracts will be consolidated as part of the new agreement. However some of the Met's current IT and telecoms deals include a £75m Ericsson contract (now taken over by Enterprise Solutions) to support the Met's mobile phones, pagers and 30,000 extensions and Unisys' contract to run the Met's mission-critical 999 'Control and Command' system.

EDS' £60m eight-year contract to run the force's crime reporting information system looks to be safe, however, with a source indicating that has already been successfully renegotiated.

John Mackie, senior consultant at outsourcing consultancy Morgan Chambers, told silicon.com that the force is likely to see significant savings from a single supplier megadeal.

"One of the demands of outsourcing to a number of different suppliers is that in-house management teams remain fairly large. Single source is worth going along with as it is unnecessary to have so many different contracts," he said.

Mackie also said that other forces around the country often follow the Met's lead and that this could lead to similar IT outsourcing deals by police forces.